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Fritz Mondale, the soggier half of the Carter-Mondale
team, still has gall, which in certain circles is enough to pass
for guts.

Mr. Jimmy has spent his golden
years sawing boards and driving
nails for the poor, observing
elections ("building democracy") in
Haiti and Bosnia and making sure
the North Koreans could build
their own nuclear weapons in
peace.

Fritz has been knocking down
the big bucks on half a dozen
corporate boards, and yesterday
he unveiled, if that is the word, the
new Fritz: grand old man of the
party, class warrior, and New
Democrat (sort of). The populism of the liberal elites.

Minnesota injected a little pizazz into a campaign that had
been merely a demonstration of how a party, when it really
wants to, can bend, fold and mutilate inconvenient election
laws. Old Fritz, straining mightily to prove that at 74 he's not
on the fritz, injected suspense. What was supposed to have
been a cake walk in Minnesota now resembles a mannerly
food fight.

Mr. Jimmy's veep yesterday accused Norm Coleman, the
Republican candidate, of fronting for "special interests,"
though presumably not for the same special interests that Mr.
Mondale himself is fronting for, and called Mr. Coleman a
creature of "the right wing," an "arbitrary right-to-lifer" who
runs with "the right-to-life crowd." It's not clear whether an
arbitrary right-to-lifer is worse than a discretionary
right-to-lifer, but Fritz, whose Junior G-man eyeglasses gave
him the look of a wrinkled bookworm, sounded
disapproving. Mr. Mondale, in the debate televised by
C-SPAN, seemed unfamiliar with the nomenclature of
contemporary debate, and threw out the words and terms
that his handlers told him were hipper, or at least more
recognizable, than the buzzwords of the Carter-Mondale era,
such as "nuclear freeze," "malaise," "hostages in Iran" and "20
percent inflation."

The Democrats, having resuscitated Mr. Mondale, are
trying to present him as the patriarch of the clan, standing
above mere mortals consigned to gritty campaign politics. But
it doesn't seem to be working. Norm Coleman has closed the
compassion gap; indeed, by one poll, taken for the St. Paul
Pioneer Press and Minnesota Public Radio (which ought to
validate its ideological purity), he has taken a statistically
respectable lead over Mr. Mondale.

What the Democrats seem not to have realized is that
most of the voters in whom a grand old man might stir a little
nostalgic longing are dead. Mr. Mondale last won an election
in Minnesota 18 years ago, and even then he came within
4,000 votes of losing the state to Ronald Reagan, who
spurned the entreaties of his wise men who calculated that
just one last airport stopover would give the Gipper an
unprecedented 50-state sweep. It's hard to find a presidential
candidate with the ability to lose his own state.

Mr. Mondale last ran for the U.S. Senate in 1970; no one
under the age of 53 ever voted to elect him to the Senate.
Minneapolis and St. Paul, two of America's most livable
cities, and its suburbs are crowded now with young families
who arrived from elsewhere, and regard Walter Mondale
only as a once-famous politician cleaning up in his old age by
calling in chits and cashing in on IOUs collected over decades
at the public trough.

But the party hacks remember exactly who he was. That's
why he was rolled out at the conclusion of what was to have
been a triumphant memorial service for Paul Wellstone, the
one remembered in Minnesota, even by Democrats, as a
colossal disaster. They reluctantly agreed to the debate
yesterday, only because a grand old man can hardly hide out
for the entire campaign, even in a campaign of less than a
week.

The hacks know that campaigning was never something
that Fritz did well. He was "selected" for his public offices,
first as state attorney general, then U.S. senator and finally
vice presidential candidate without fighting through a single
contested primary. Nobody would have beaten Ronald
Reagan in 1984, but Fritz made sure that nobody would ever
accuse him of making the Gipper pop a sweat. He chose
Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, who spent the
campaign trying to explain that maybe there were crooks in
her family but she wasn't one of them, and then Fritz tried to
explain away his first campaign promise, made in his
acceptance speech, that if elected he would raise everyone's
taxes.

Maybe it was inevitable that Fritz would make a race of
what looked a week ago like a Democratic runaway. Given
the givens - that American voters, with an excess of
compassion, often show a weakness for grand old men and
widows with no other means of support and elect them to
high office as a form of assisted living - he might be back on
his way to Washington.